As you may already know, we have stopped offering virtual servers on the Parallels Virtuozzo platform and have upgraded our platform to Microsoft Hyper-V. This document is intended to give you a brief overview of some of the benefits with Hyper-V over our old Virtuozzo platform and similar implementations:

Updates are done on your side so you can install them on your schedule instead of when we tell you we are installing them. You can also configure them to install (and probably reboot) at a specific time each week.

Virtuozzo requires updates are first "approved" by Parallels, before being installed in a VPS node. This can require several weeks! If an important security update is pending then Virtuozzo users could be forced to run without updated software until Parallels approves the update. Hyper-V does not have the limitation. Updates are available as soon as they are published by Microsoft!

If we need to update a node then we can just update the node during our maintenance window. When we reboot a node, it will suspend the virtual machine (VM) and then resume when the node is back up. No reboot of the VM.

It is VERY stable! Parallels had some issues in this area. Hyper-V does not. It is an incredibly stable platform.

Autoboot is preinstalled in all Trader's VPS's. The VM has also been configured more resistant to double login sessions.

our Multilingual User Interface version (same VM, just added languages) offers Windows in the following flavors, easily selectable on the desktop: English, German, Japanese, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portugese, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish & Portugese. There are many more on the way. We have two versions of the same VM. One just has more languages but there is less available disk space because of the space needed to support them.

The base VM has increased to 15GB in disk, but only about 7-8GB is usable. Previously about 3 of 5GB was usable. In the MUI version, about 5-6GB is available (I think).

We can do live migrations on the back-end for quality of service. With Virtuozzo, any migration requires a reboot of the VE. So if someone starts using a lot of resources, we can't do much but wait for weekend and then adjust. With Hyper-V, we have software constantly monitoring the network and if a node becomes over utilized we then automatically move the VM on the back-end. The end subscriber barely sees a blip, certainly not a reboot.

Total software compatibility. Some things could not be installed in Virtuozzo. Hyper-V is virtualized on the metal, so there is no such compatibility issues. Skype will probably work better.

Since the VMs are virtualized on the hardware, we do not need one massive operating system to support all the RAM. This allows us to setup x86 windows, which should work with ANY EA (even those pesky EAs that require DLLs). You can still pick x64. Even 2008, it just uses more resources. Our trader's VPS is configured to run VERY lean. We did not have this much flexibility with Virtuozzo.

And, it offers Full Virtualization, which Virtuzzo doesn't.
- It can run Windows VPS's
- FreeBSD VPS's
- one broken VPS doesn't affect others, i.e. with memory leaks or run-away processes
- the host nodes are only running Windows. No other software is installed (which will consume resources and can cause conflicts or stability issues). Windows and only Windows. We use Windows built in management API's to communicate and manage them.
- no overselling ( which is probably why so many providers love Virtuozzo - they can oversell server resources by 100% - 200%). Since Hyper-V does not support overselling resources, it means that if you subscribe to 1GB of RAM, there is 1GB of RAM on the server for you and only you. With other VPS solutions, they can over sell which means some (if not all) of the RAM will be disk swap. And due to the mechanical nature of disk I/O, performance will never be as good as it could be with Hyper-V, PERIOD!